(5) Find critical SEO issues that hurt your website’s performance in Google
Our Site Audit tool will scan your website for over 120 common SEO issues and provide detailed recommendations on how to fix them.
You can also set up recurring website audits and monitor your "SEO Health score" over time.
This is especially useful when there are many people in your company who can make changes to your website and, in doing so, may accidentally break things.
(6) Estimate the ranking difficulty of any keyword
Some keywords are incredibly easy to rank for, while others are pretty much unattainable—even for big, authoritative websites.
But how do you know which is which?
Use our Keyword Difficulty score!
IMPORTANT NOTE!
We don’t advise our customers to make important SEO decisions based on this simple two-digit number ALONE.
The real ranking difficulty of a keyword is much more complex and nuanced than that.
(7) Find out where your competitors got their backlinks
One of the most common jobs of an SEO professional is to figure out where the top-ranking pages got their backlinks (and how to get the same backlinks for their own page).
Ahrefs is known as an absolute leader in that 😎
(8) Discover your competitors’ “linkable assets”
Study your top competitors and see which of their pages have attracted the most links.
You can do that using the "Best by links" report in Site Explorer.
(9) Monitor your ranking progress for thousands of keywords
The "Organic keywords" report in Site Explorer will show you nearly all of the keywords that your website is ranking for in Google.
Even my long-abandoned personal blog still ranks #1 for a bunch of keywords it seems:
(10) Find gaps in your content strategy
A “gap” in content strategy is when your competitors are all ranking for important keywords that bring lots of valuable traffic to them while your own website doesn’t target those keywords.
Use "Content Gap" report to study that:
(11) Find hundreds of quality link prospects in seconds
Let’s say you’re doing SEO for a productivity app.
Wouldn’t it be useful for you to get a list of all websites that mentioned the words “productivity app” somewhere in the content?
You can do that in Content Explorer:
That's it! :)
11 simplest and most actionable use cases of Ahrefs that were selected with the SEO newbies in mind.
If you would like to see a more detailed version of this list with a few extra tips and use cases, check out this post on our blog:
If you want the pages of your website to rank high in Google, you will almost certainly need links.
Links from other websites tell Google that your content is notable and deserves to rank high.
So (generally) the more links you have - the better.
But how/where to get them?
Conceptually, there are just 4 ways to get links:
Add: Manually add links to websites.
Ask: Email website owners & ask for a link.
Buy: Exchange money for links.
Earn: Get links from people who visited your page.
(these come together into a totally un-memorable acronym — AABE)
I recently tried to acquire some links to one of my blog posts..
So I reviewed ~200 link prospects (collected by a contractor) and sent ~90 emails.
...and it was quite a learning experience to be honest.
[Read more..]
First.. The RESULTS:
🔹 ~200 prospects reviewed;
🔹 ~90 emails sent;
🔹 13 links acquired (a few more might come later);
🔹 14 people wanted some sort of a "deal;"
🔹 3 people said "no."
15% success rate is not too shabby (from what I've heard from my SEO friends).
Soo..
What did I learn in the process?
Quite a few things actually.
But before I share my "lessons" with you, please be advised that what is about to follow is mostly based on my GUT FEELING and perception, rather than any scientific evidence.